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T Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 (IACA) was immediately a part of ongoing legal contestations in the United States about American Indian and Alaskan Native'governance, the politics of indigenous identification, and histories of cultural appropriation and expropriation. Representatives Jon Kyl (R.-Ariz.) and Ben Nighthorse Campbell (D.-Colo.) 2 submitted the IACA in 1989, based on a 1935 act of the same name (Collier 1934; Schrader 1983), and after extensive revisions it was signed into law by President George HW Bush (Parsley 1993). The IACA was foremost a response to the growing competitiveness of the Indian" arts and crafts" 3 market within the United States, estimated to be worth close to $1 billion annually, and to ineffectual laws in regu-i lating imports and appropriations said to undercut indigenous revenue> guaranteed by the earlier statute (Parsley 1993, 489; Lund 1976, 1-6; Wallis 1993, 29).